GitHub could be acquired by Microsoft

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Thursday, 7 June 2018 at 05:28:26 UTC, Nick Sabalausky 
(Abscissa) wrote:
> I've always felt GitLab was better than GitHub (in large part 
> because they're sensible enough to support self-hosting), so 
> it's tempting to use this as a great reason to move to GitLab.

I've been following the discussions (mainly on HN) on the 
subject, and there are a few arguments against GitLab (i.e. the 
gitlab.com SaaS) as well.

- The company might be purchased by a bigger one in the same way 
that happened to GitHub.
- The conflict of interest between the free and paid tiers means 
that some issues that are useful for open-source projects won't 
be available to them, even though they are available at their 
competitors.
- gitlab.com provides features unavailable in the open-source 
(community) edition to all projects, which means that migrating 
away from gitlab.com and to a self-hosted instance would be a 
compromise involving losing features.

> In any case, I've always thought it was absolutely sick that 
> that even though GitHub/BitBucket/GitLab/Launchpad/etc. all 
> provide basically the same features on top of the standard 
> ***distributed*** version control systems, they are all 
> completely incapable of talking to each other or acting as 
> interchangable viewers on a single set of common project data. 
> So much for the "distributed" in "DVCS".

Many people think so too:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/4517
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/4013

Unfortunately it looks like the current plan for federation in 
GitLab will once again be only in the paid version.